Higher Education TPRM in 2026: New Research Maps the Vendor Visibility Gap | UpGuard

### Executive summary: This report analyzes third-party cyber risk across 515 US universities (≈105,006 vendor relationships, ~5,400 unique suppliers), highlights vendor concentration (11 vendors present at ≥80% of campuses; Microsoft at 97.4%), documents breach prevalence (28% of the top 100 vendors breached since 2024) and evidence of infostealer infections (11.1% of vendors), and uses examples such as the Canvas ransomware and a ShinyHunters Oracle compromise to recommend continuous monitoring, risk-based assessment depth, and treating critical suppliers as ongoing dependencies.